History is an illness which we must try to cure.

I’m paraphrasing James Joyce, who had one of his characters say, ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’.

But history as illness – with different symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, researchers, tools and doctors – is, I think, an almost perfect metaphor for doing history in a completely new way.

It’s a complaint I have – having gone through a BA and MA in history – and really the purpose and modus operandi of this channel: that we need no less than a revolution in historical thinking.

Because the way we think about the past, the ways it’s been taught to us, the way we approach it culturally, societally, politically, is not only wrong – it is limiting us, and it defines and restricts our future.

George Orwell knew this when he said: ‘who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.

Traditionally, gatekeepers, the establishment, the status quo, have propagated this idea of history being something out there or back there – out there in books, films, statues – or back there, separate from us, distinct from the present. This means we often see it as a stale and almost pointless subject – it has no effect on real daily lives.

But many other, often radical thinkers have circled around this idea of history being always present – the water in which we swim.

The French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu said that, ‘in each of us, in varying proportions, there is part of yesterday’s man; it is yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts to little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed’.

The Belgian writer Luc Saint said that, ‘every human being is an archaeological site’.

And James Baldwin said that, ‘History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history’.

In other words, we live in symbiosis with history as if it’s part of our bodies and minds – we have a historical DNA.

And like DNA, history has provided us with possibilities and defects. Skills and illnesses. It opens and closes horizons and possibilities.

Bourdieu – interested in what makes up our historical DNA – said we had bundles of habits that we inherit from our cultural and social life. He called this our habitus – our predispositions, tendencies, propensities, inclinations. We have cultural attitudes, beliefs, and sensibilities. What we like, how we speak, what we do is not just about personality; our personalities are moulded from the raw materials of society.

History opens and closes the possibilities that we all have – those who understand history understand the moves that can be made.

Let me give you a real example.

Nietzsche saw that Christian morality was a guide to life that had a history, that Christian values – compassion, selflessness, meekness, the foregoing of material riches say – weren’t just god-given values, they had a history that made them seem like they were god-given.

He thought that what seemed like good guides to life might contain mistakes that injure us, that contribute to social illness.

Nietzsche asked though whether ‘regressive traits’ might be found lurking in our definitions of good – poisons, narcotics, he called them – ‘so that the present lived at the expense of the future’.

In other words, it might be that the ways we do things in the present, that are shaped by history, restrict our future possibilities.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault saw this literally: he saw that the body was ‘totally imprinted by history’.

Foucault said that we believe ‘that the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology and that it escapes the influence of history, but this too is false. The body is moulded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances’.

Social convention, schooling, the shape of media, cultural trends – they all produce habits of the body. Everything we do – what we eat, where we shop, how we interact and think, our political and cultural conversations – emerge from history. Which leads to a question. How do we know which of them are good and which others might need updating?

Let’s start from a provocative assumption: we’re all ill. We all have aches and pains, issues and impediments – habits that help and habits that hinder. Sometimes the harmful ones cause us real physical pain, sometimes mental anguish, and sometimes they’re asymptomatic.

We are all historians. We all take an impediment we have, dig through our past experience, seek out new solutions, and try, through understanding the world, to make our lives better. The starting point is always selecting a symptom.

The historian E.H. Carr said that when the historian begins their work, they start by choosing their facts like fish from a fishmongers slab – ready to cook up a historical narrative.

But, he points out, importantly, ‘the facts speak only when the historian calls on them’.

So why do we call on them? When do we knock upon history’s door? For what reasons do we knock, what do we hope to find inside? We call upon history because of a symptom in the present.

Consider the history student – the root, the foundation, the seed of all history, history itself in training – choosing to study history, desiring to pass it on, a passion, a pain, a symptom emerged from life experience. Why do they choose their subject? Why do they choose to study the Holocaust, or the French Revolution, or plagues and pandemics, or presidents or slavery?

They have an itch, a passion, a pain – a symptom – something magnetic that draws them in.

A symptom might be a fear – a fear of war, a fear of revolution, a fear of despotism – that leads us to try and illuminate why these things occurred in the past so as to inoculate us in the future. A belief that the study of this is needed now.

But the symptom is where it begins.

There are very literal analogies for history being an illness. Not so long ago, pains were believed to be treated with cures with long historical precedent. Crowds of thousands would line the streets of Paris to receive the royal touch from the king, who, because of his divine right, could heal their sickness. Louis XVI – a reasonably modern king overthrown by the French Revolution – touched thousands of lined up subjects at his coronation in 1775.

Physicians believed in blood-letting, leeches in the rectum, consulting the idea of the four humours, that a person’s dry character led to a dry body, illness caused by dryness needed a wet treatment, and cold illness was treated with warmth, or vice versa. There were reasons for all these cures.

To return to Nietzsche: can ‘regressive traits’ be found lurking in our definitions of good – poisons, narcotics – ‘so that the present lived at the expense of the future’.

Are our treatments for life worse than the disease?

Where else might we find cures worse than the sickness? We look for symptoms.

In the pain and loneliness of prison? In hunger? In fatigue? In a painful feeling of disgust – at Jews during 1930s Germany? At the touch of a black American during Jim Crow? In the words of politicians? In the stress of being ‘always online’, the anxiety of social media? Symptoms are everywhere.

And we often medicate symptoms instead of investigating them.

Western medicine, many have criticised, is patient-centric. It treats the symptom by focusing on the biological pain of the patient, rather than the deeper cause – it overprescribes, plastering over wider individual and societal issues. This is especially true with mental health.

Many sociologists of mental health, doctors, and scientists argue for a broadening of diagnoses outwards. Is anxiety, for example, a biological problem – a genetic deficiency – or a symptom of how an individual interacts with the wider world, itself defined by cultural, social, political, or economic contexts? Is it, in other words, a product of history?

Anxiety and stress are of course relatively new conditions – ideas like hysteria or neurosis preceded them – but anxiety, for example, as an idea only emerged in the early twentieth century, a particular historical construction – the product of a modern world, and popularised by Freud and philosophers like Heidegger. In his 1950 book The Meaning of Anxiety, Rollo May wrote, ‘Every alert citizen of our society realizes, on the basis of his own experience as well as his observation of his fellow-men, that anxiety is a pervasive and profound phenomenon in the twentieth century’.

To understand a symptom we must go deeper and wider.

The Hearing Voices Network, a charity founded by psychiatrists to supports people who hear voices, recommends that instead of asking, ‘what’s wrong with you?’, doctors begin with, ‘what’s happened to you?’

Anxiety, stress, depression, overwork, heart problems, PTSD, eating disorders – issues that lead to physical symptoms – aren’t just individual problems, but public ones – arising from our common culture.

There are biological markers – feelings, complaints, pains, symptoms – but the cause – unlike with, say, a broken bone – lies outwards, somewhere in the world, in something that’s happened.

Physical symptoms can need a metaphysical diagnosis.

As Anne Rogers and David Pilgrim write in their introduction to the sociology of mental health, ‘In the case of mental health problems and their management, the complex reality of the economic, socialization and welfare systems is relevant to understanding them. The economic system generates stressors, and profits from its amelioration. The socialization system determines the adoption of social norms during childhood and offers corrective interventions of secondary socialization if those norms are transgressed in adulthood’.

Many, like Rogers and Pilgrim, have argued for an expanded view of what’s called aetiology – the search for the cause or set of causes of a medical problem – looking for societal causes as well as individual ones.

Follow. The. Symptom.

If we live symbiotically with history, if it’s part of us, like bacteria in our gut, like a cultural meme – how do we analyse it? A biologist would isolate a symptom, asking what’s causing it. Why is it there? What’s its purpose? Where does it lead? Is its cause environmental? Genetic? Follow the chain of clues. Everything has a genealogy.

Every habit we have was inserted into our historical consciousness by someone, by a group, by a cultural belief. Why did they do it? What mistakes did they make? What assumptions did they have?

I come back to E.H. Carr’s formulation often, because it is deceptively simple, and actually says so so much – the historian approaches the facts like fish on a fishmongers slab. But, crucially, the facts speak only when they’re called upon.

In other words, the calling upon – the formulation of questions – happens way before the writing of the history.

Before history is uncovered, questions must be asked of it. And those questions come from everyone’s symptoms. We all contribute, in small ways, to the historical process – you watching, liking, or subscribing to this video is an act of history, so is googling, choosing a book and signalling our interest through bestseller lists or view counts. When each of us asks questions of history we contribute to it.

In other words, history isn’t just about historians – we all need to control the present to control the past to control the future. We are the questions. Which is why I’m still – despite everything – optimistic about the direction on the internet. These tools – mouse, keyboard, camera – are all tools that can contribute to democratising history.

The idea of history is an illness and everyone has symptoms. History can be elitist. Royal history was popular, or the history of war, then politics, because those were the issues that establishment figures were contending with. It’s only really in the last century that historians have started to look outwards – history from below, working class history, LGBTQ+ history, and so on, as history has become more inclusive.

Which is why I love this platform. If you have a symptom – an itch – scratch it. Search for its roots. De-normalise what we think of as normal.

Grief, sadness, depression, stress, anxiety, bullying, racism, prison, confinement, loneliness, war, domination – they’re all symptoms.

History is an illness. We can each cure it.